Depicting revolutionary France, Dickens wrote, “Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!”
Today America’s tumbrils are clattering about, carrying toppled statues, ruined careers, unwoke brands. Over their sides peer those deemed racist by left-wing identitarians and sentenced to cancelation, even as the evidentiary standard for that crime falls through the floor. Rioters over the weekend destroyed a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the general who finished off the Confederacy. Falsehoods and innuendoes outpace the truth: in Oakland, a panic arose over what were supposedly nooses in a public park; turns out they were just exercise equipment that had been there for months. But no matter. America’s Jacobins are in no mood to reason. As in Dickens’ France, genuine social problems have mushroomed into a national orgy of self-harm.
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